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Shonagon' S the Pillow Book the American Diary of a Japanese Girl

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Shonagon' S the Pillow Book the American Diary of a Japanese Girl DRESSED TO CROSS: NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE AND INTEGRATION IN SEI SHONAGON'S THE PILLOW BOOK AND YONE NOGUCHI'S THE AMERICAN DIARY OF A JA PANESE GIRL Ina Christiane Seethaler Saint Louis University In Japan around the year 1000, Sei ShOnagon adds a list to her Pil­ low Book in which she collects "Things that are distressing to see." Her first item on the list is "Someone wearing a robe with the back seam hitched over to one side, or with the collar falling back to reveal the nape of the neck" (Sh6nagon 117). This depiction of the gaping body stands as a signifier for ShOnagon's anxieties about maintaining class propriety. At the beginning of the twentieth-century, Morning Glory, a newly arrived Japanese immigrant to the U.S. and protagonist of Yone Nogu­ chi's The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902), secretly dresses in her uncle's clothes, wishing that she "could only be a gentleman for just one day!" (32). Morning Glory's desire to switch genders speaks to her perception of womanhood as marked by social powerlessness. What is at stake in these examples is the persistent cultural motif whereby people escape the imposition of cultured, gendered, or class norms. Though reading back more than a millennium, these stories speak to the power of bodily and sartorial transformations, whether startlingly permanent or temporarily enabling. They question categories of gender, class, and cultural integration and give insight into how early Japanese immigrants to the U.S. used clothing as subversion in a manner similar to century-old practices by Japanese women in need of securing survival. Since, according to E. Jane Burns, clothes "participate in a complex sys­ tem of fabrications that move constantly between individual bodies and the social sphere, between material objects and various cultural represen­ tations of them, creating a relational dynamic" (4), dress constitutes the ideal tool for accomplishing the endeavor of crossing social and cultural boundaries. Cross-dressing, drag, impersonation, and transvestism are surely well-known concepts. Using Marjory Garber's understanding of trans­ vestism as creating a "category crisis" which points to "cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances" (16), I argue that Sei Sh6nagon and Morning Glory make use of their clothing to disrupt and question the idea of a 185 186 ETHNIC STUDIES REVIEW [Vol. 34:185 stable identity. In doing so, I attempt to extend Garber's influential anal­ ysis in relation to the lives of early Japanese immigrants to the United States. All characters discussed in this article successfully employ their apparel to "negotiate ...among individual desire, perception, and fan­ tasy on the one hand, and cultural demands and conventions on the other" (Burns 4). As Burns makes clear, clothes affect both the personal and the social realm and can thus exert influence in both spheres. Ulti­ mately, I hope that the connections I am drawing will clarify further our understanding of how early Japanese immigrants to the U.S. experi­ mented with markers of identity to create a Japanese American subjectivity. In her Pillow Book (Makura no s6shi), Sei ShOnagon, Empress Sadako's lady-in-waiting between 993-1000, highlights the importance of dress in medieval Japan with painstaking descriptions of her sartorial surroundings. Ivan Morris elaborates that Heian Japan [794-1185] devel­ oped a cult of beauty in terms of architecture and decor and the "manu­ facture and dyeing of textiles had reached a high point of achievement" (171). The arrangement of colors in clothing presented a high standard by which people were judged since it spoke to a person's artistic sensibil­ ity. In fact, "good looks tended to take the place over virtue" (Morris 195). Meredith McKinney explains that dress depended enormously on social setting and level of formality and that, while conformity was largely desired, individuality could be expressed via a blend of color, choices of design and fabric, or a combination of all of these elements (Appendix 291). Instances which ShOnagon recounts in The Pillow Book speak to this significance of dress in everyday life. She describes how the women­ in-waiting attain the attention of possible suitors by showing them noth­ ing more but the colored layers (kasane) of their sleeves;1 ShOnagon fur­ ther explains to her readers how the status of a Counselor is apparent by his layers of visible under-robe and that men above the fourth rank were easily distinguishable because they were the only people to wear black jackets. Considering the darkness of the rooms at court, the vividness and detail with which ShOnagon describes dress to her readers is astounding. A certain instance comes to mind when she reports minutely on a court­ ier's splendid attire: "He wore a gorgeous damask cloak in the cherry­ blossom combination, with an immaculate luster to its lining, and his gathered trousers of rich, dark grape colour were woven through with a dazzling pattern of tangled wisteria vine" (Shonagon 70). This passage 1 Women's dresses could consist of up to twelve layers. For colors to be adequately admired, "each sleeve was longer as it came closer to the skin" (Morris 204). McKinney, in fact, presents the reader with five pages of sartorial terms in appendix 6 to her edition of the Pillow Book (294-298). 20 11] DRESSED TO CROSS 187 convincingly attests to the significant impressions dress made on ladies­ in-waiting in their everyday lives. For ShOnagon herself, the dresses she wore gave her entrance to a world into which she was not born. In fact, ShOnagon lived at court and enjoyed its pleasures for only seven years before she descended again in status and lived the rest of her life in poverty. According to McKinney, Sh6nagon was born into what she herself would have called "the periph­ ery of this world" as her father held a rank far from prestigious at court (Introduction x, xii). In her writing, ShOnagon essentially does not ac­ knowledge a life before or after her time at court. It appears that her identity is only formed when she comes to court and that she ceases to exist when she is forced to leave. Even her first name changes as Sh6nagon merely denotes the title of "Junior Counsellor" (McKinney, Introduction xi). I argue that ShOnagon holds on to her seemingly preca­ rious status at court by means of the power of dress. Considering that "[c]ulture and civilization were synonymous with court life, and the closer one was to the Emperor the closer one was to its essence" (Mc­ Kinney, Introduction x), ShOnagon engages in what I call "imperial drag," which allows her to transcend social categories. The wearing and displaying of sophisticated apparel functions as a type of performance by means of which Sh6nagon consolidates her change in status. Supporting this argument, Edith Sarra points to the predominance of spectacle at court which turns self-display into channels of power and accords the function of costumes to the dresses worn (226). Yet the "threat of pov­ erty and obscurity" was always a possibility for ladies-in-waiting (Fukumori 26), which explains why dress played such a crucial role in their lives.2 An episode which I interpret as resembling imperial drag describes the habit of the ladies-in-waiting to keep either the left or right sleeve of their gown longer than the other, depending on which side of the carriage they sit in, for the "delectation of passers-by" (Morris 205). This sartorial technique publicly displays their social cross-dress and ensures the admi­ ration of their status. In order to perpetuate the effectiveness of imperial drag, Sh6nagon has to point to the crude manners of those outside, com­ pared with the taste and refined conventions of those at court. For her, filthy attire and coarse behavior go together, which explains, I claim, her somewhat dismissive attitude toward beggars, low-ranking aristocrats, and commoners. In her list of "Repulsive Things," she includes, for ex­ ample, a "very ordinary woman looking afterlots of children" (Sh6nagon 151). These attitudes reflect ShOnagon' s anxieties about the precarious- 2 A later text, Mumyozoshi (An Untitled Book, Kuwabara, 1976) describes Sh6nagon after she has left the court as "wearing a lowly robe and a hat of patched cloths" (qtd. in Fukumori 28). 188 ETHNIC STUDIES REVIEW [Vol. 34: 185 ness of her own status. In contrast to this stands Sh6nagon's veneration of her empress's attire. ShOnagon describes with admiration how Her Majesty's "wonderful, glowing pale plum-pink sleeves filled [her] with deep awe" and make her think that she "never knew someone so marvel­ ous could exist" (169). Clearly, Sh6nagon equates dress with empower­ ment, and she herself takes advantage of the accessories of her imperial drag to disrupt further the categories by which she is bound. Dress makes Sh6nagon confident, as Linda Chance observes, to "relish[ ] her victories over men and behave[ ] in other ways that did not conform to the officially sanctioned ideal of femininity, which called for submission to strictly defined social roles of service and inferiority vis-a­ vis men" (142). Sh6nagon's imperial drag enables her to question and cross status and gender borders that confine her to a role of passivity and compliance. ShOnagon is painstakingly aware of the instability of her hold onto her status at court and fears every instance which threatens the effectiveness of her imperial drag. An episode that portrays the impor­ tance of appearance to the reader constitutes the Empress's stay at Narimasa's (a nobleman) residence. Because the gates of Narimasa's es­ tate are too small for the imperial carriages to pass through them, the ladies in waiting have to leave their carriage in order to get into the house.
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